Does any one use or know anything about BOINC or World Community Grid? I am looking for a alternative to F@H.

Lets just say I have spent the last two days reading over at the F@H forums and am pretty turned off by the lack of communication from the project leadership and the condescending attitude of the forum moderators. A prime example would be this thread here where Big Advantage donors are getting a kick in the private parts with no real explanation. To sum it up if your system has less than 24 cores your out of luck come February 17th. Then two months later, If your system has less than 32 cores your also out of luck come April 17th. No more Big Advantage WU's for you.

I am having a hard time justifying the donation of my computer time and electrical costs to the Pande Group at this point. No, this is not due to my own account name error from a few days ago. But that error got me reading over on those forums and I did not like what I found.

I have 3 PC's running BOINC, worldcommunitygrid, and 1 running Fah. I would like to convert the sole Fah box to BOINC but time and my limited understanding of linux have prevented that. Consider visiting the WCG forums. The one for active research may have a cause that appeals to you. The one for agent support is like the tech support side of foldingforum. There are some serious crunchers that participate in the distributed computing forum at anandtech. Hope that is okay for me to say here. In 4 years time, my personal team Fah ranking bubbled up to the top 1599. Now due to the focus on GPU, I am being passed by. In 3 years time, I've gone from 48,000-something to being in the top 9,500 for WCG.

I use Bionic exclusively. they have vastly better projects and pande is a doodoo head.

that said, I never particularly liked the points measuring that goes on in the F@H community. If you support the project, and its goals then why should you be upset if you get -bigadv vs something else??? the problem with F@H is the overall project isn't really accomplishing much except wasting donor's time and money, so they make it all about the points.

I'd much rather contribute to the clean water project, rossetta@home or even prime grid where I can 1) see the results as they come out and 2) see the real world applications of those results. everybody has their own threshold of the type of science they like to support, I don't see the reason why F@H protien folding ever got as popular as it did.

Okay, there are plenty of ways to donate. And the donor gets to decide. This is why I don't like big organizations that you "sign up for", or one big agency that burrows their way into your managements' heads and has money taken out of your pay. They expect the money every week/month/year regardless if they did a good job or had a lot of scandals or made poor progress on something. And when they don't get their "protection money", they flood you with mailings and sometimes phone calls! So now I now send all mailings from United Way and American Red Cross back to them in their own postage-paid envelopes, marked "no solicitations please".

I prefer to make my donations in other ways. Attending (or serving at) a dinner/dance with an auction. Food to a food bank. One-time cash in the collection plate at a church that I will never attend on a regular basis (always in a plain envelope with no way to trace it back to me). Folding.

I think anytime a donor starts feeling like his donation is either not appreciated or not put to proper use, then of course he should stop donating to that organization. This is why I never donate money to any agency affiliated with The United Way. Their past heavy-handed ways, bad treatment of some good charities and nonprofits, and "recommended" donation levels put a bad taste in my mouth for years. I may never get over it with those people.

I also put a time limit on my donations. My personal rule is "no open-ended arrangements". I am not a bottomless barrel and I am not a sheep to be shorn or a cow to be milked on a perpetual basis. I usually limit my association with any given agency to a year. For F@H, I've decided on a "five year mission", because after all, it's a much longer journey.

Constant review and ongoing re-assessment is important for us all to do, but Khali, I try to avoid becoming so excited about a couple of forum thread postings that it makes me want to leave. If you are going to leave F@H, make it for other reasons. Tangible reasons. Other massive computing projects will no doubt have their own thorny patches, and really when all is said and done, we humans get good at what we practice. If we practice getting miffed, then it won't be long before everything and everybody miffs us.

Some forums are just brusk, but remember also that these are university projects. You may be dealing with some institutional hubris. Even in good people, it's unavoidable in a university setting. So when you go to their forum, maybe you can think of it like you're visiting another neighborhood. Community dynamics are not the same everywhere. When you go into a tough neighborhood, you may have to put on the old coat and a snarl. And don't think you have to pick up their litter... And of course, if you think they're not treating you well, then SAY SO. That's why forums have PMs. And if that doesn't work, then appeal to the forum community. Stir it up, make some noise, and have a little fun along the way.

Anyway Khali...good luck in your quest.

Diplomacy42 wrote:

I use Bionic exclusively. they have vastly better projects and pande is a doodoo head...

A "doodoo head?" Are we five now?

Personally, I like the point system. We are by nature a competitive species, so there has to be some kind of benchmark, or we'll get bored and just end up drooling and sucking our thumbs in the corner.

For thousands of years we have kept score in all areas of life, because it helps measure our progress and success. It may sound tough but I'm okay with this.

http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/ has several pulsar search options that I like.You can opt for Fermi Gamma Ray Observatory data, or one of several radio telescope feeds. CPU and GPU support for a fairly wide range of graphics chipsets. The user forum is helpful and quite down-to-Earth.

(I'm downright cynical about the LIGO gravity wave 'observatory,' and consider it a prime example of Big Science run amok. After all too many lofty presentations about "Solving the mysteries of the Universe," and nearly a $1B spent, there is not a single GW observation to show after nearly 10 years of looking.)

http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/ has several pulsar search options that I like.You can opt for Fermi Gamma Ray Observatory data, or one of several radio telescope feeds. CPU and GPU support for a fairly wide range of graphics chipsets. The user forum is helpful and quite down-to-Earth.

(I'm downright cynical about the LIGO gravity wave 'observatory,' and consider it a prime example of Big Science run amok. After all too many lofty presentations about "Solving the mysteries of the Universe," and nearly a $1B spent, there is not a single GW observation to show after nearly 10 years of looking.)

After I saw one Halloween episode of The Simpsons, where the aliens came to Springfield, I decided that we are not yet able to protect ourselves from any big-headed race of slobbering aliens who consider us to be a tasty food source. So no Seti for me.

Either in that episode or another one, they used an ice cream scoop to remove Homer's brain. I laughed for a week. But even more reason not to go looking for aliens...

http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/ has several pulsar search options that I like.You can opt for Fermi Gamma Ray Observatory data, or one of several radio telescope feeds. CPU and GPU support for a fairly wide range of graphics chipsets. The user forum is helpful and quite down-to-Earth.

(I'm downright cynical about the LIGO gravity wave 'observatory,' and consider it a prime example of Big Science run amok. After all too many lofty presentations about "Solving the mysteries of the Universe," and nearly a $1B spent, there is not a single GW observation to show after nearly 10 years of looking.)

After I saw one Halloween episode of The Simpsons, where the aliens came to Springfield, I decided that we are not yet able to protect ourselves from any big-headed race of slobbering aliens who consider us to be a tasty food source. So no Seti for me.

Either in that episode or another one, they used an ice cream scoop to remove Homer's brain. I laughed for a week. But even more reason not to go looking for aliens...

Chances are that any extraterrestrial life that come visiting us will operate on a different protein chain or some other metabolic scheme that would make us bio-hazardous to consume. Not many sci-fi flicks explore this. The most notable examples would be Mass Effect (Turian/Quarian versus Humans/Salarian/Asari).

Last edited by Krogoth on Thu Jul 23, 2015 11:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Just in case anyone was wondering what I ended up doing. I installed the BOINC software fairly easily, once I figured out which version would work on Win8.

It took me a couple of days to get used to what settings did what and their proper setting for my system. The big difference from F@H is you don't get one job and all your CPU cores chew on it. With BOINC you get one job for each CPU core. So instead of one SMP job I get four separate tasks to work on and each one only takes a couple of hours to up to a day to complete, the day long jobs are rare. I think the average task time is around two hours. Projects that utilize GPU's are a bit rarer but there are some out there.

With BOINC you can pick from a huge array of projects to work on. Bio sciences, Astronomy, Mathematics, and Material sciences. Since my interest is in Medical related work I am running three different projects out of the many I could have chosen from.

POEM@home studies proteins in a similar fashion as F@H.

GPU Grid does Molecular Dynamics Simulations on GPU's as the name implies. They study drug interaction on a cellular level, how diseases mutate on a cellular level, and investigate how proteins relate to neurological disorders.

World Community Grid is a program run by IBM that hosts several different projects that range from Cancer research, HIV research, Water filtration material simulations, and solar cell material research. You can pick and choose what you want to contribute to.

Its strange getting used to seeing so many tasks running at once where before I was limited to one CPU and one GPU task at a time per system. Now I have four CPU and one GPU tasks running on my i5 gaming system and eight CPU tasks running on a i7 laptop.

After I saw one Halloween episode of The Simpsons, where the aliens came to Springfield, I decided that we are not yet able to protect ourselves from any big-headed race of slobbering aliens who consider us to be a tasty food source. So no Seti for me.

Either in that episode or another one, they used an ice cream scoop to remove Homer's brain. I laughed for a week. But even more reason not to go looking for aliens...

Ahh, but most SETI projects aren't attempting to *contact* the aliens, they are attempting to *detect* them. So more of an attempt at an early warning system than an invitation to a buffet!

After I saw one Halloween episode of The Simpsons, where the aliens came to Springfield, I decided that we are not yet able to protect ourselves from any big-headed race of slobbering aliens who consider us to be a tasty food source. So no Seti for me.

Either in that episode or another one, they used an ice cream scoop to remove Homer's brain. I laughed for a week. But even more reason not to go looking for aliens...

Ahh, but most SETI projects aren't attempting to *contact* the aliens, they are attempting to *detect* them. So more of an attempt at an early warning system than an invitation to a buffet!

But you just know that the moment we discover an unambiguous alien signal, some bright-eyed fool will advocate building and aiming a giant transmitter back at them. "Hey! Yooo-hoo! We're over here, guys! Please come assimilate, exterminate, and/or devour us!"

After I saw one Halloween episode of The Simpsons, where the aliens came to Springfield, I decided that we are not yet able to protect ourselves from any big-headed race of slobbering aliens who consider us to be a tasty food source. So no Seti for me.

Either in that episode or another one, they used an ice cream scoop to remove Homer's brain. I laughed for a week. But even more reason not to go looking for aliens...

Ahh, but most SETI projects aren't attempting to *contact* the aliens, they are attempting to *detect* them. So more of an attempt at an early warning system than an invitation to a buffet!

But you just know that the moment we discover an unambiguous alien signal, some bright-eyed fool will advocate building and aiming a giant transmitter back at them. "Hey! Yooo-hoo! We're over here, guys! Please come assimilate, exterminate, and/or devour us!"

Given that we're already pretty sure none of the "nearby" systems have intelligent life, it'll take hundreds of years for the message to get there, and for the ensuing fleet to arrive (assuming anybody at the other end is even listening). You and I, and our children and grandchildren will be long dead by then. We may have even wiped ourselves out as a civilization, due to forms of stupidity more blatant than inviting a fleet of hungry aliens over for dinner.

Given that we're already pretty sure none of the "nearby" systems have intelligent life, it'll take hundreds of years for the message to get there, and for the ensuing fleet to arrive (assuming anybody at the other end is even listening). You and I, and our children and grandchildren will be long dead by then. We may have even wiped ourselves out as a civilization, due to forms of stupidity more blatant than inviting a fleet of hungry aliens over for dinner.

Not my problem!

Well, I WAS trying to take the long view....

When the Drengin Empire arrives and tosses all of humanity into their Death Furnaces, your great-...-great-grandchildren will die cursing your name!

I do suspect you're right about our imminent self-destruction. Sooner or later our instinctive tribalism will be the end of us...

As I alluded to in the previous post, there are many much more likely ways that we will destroy ourselves as a civilization. My flip "not my problem" response was kind of my way of saying "this is so unlikely to happen and is so far in the future that it is lost in the noise". It is like worrying that you might die from getting hit by lightning next year while your house is burning down around you.

I've been donating my computer power to distributed.net Optimal Golomb Ruler search for a while now. I like it, because it's one of the last distributed computing projects that needs a CPU. Apparently GPUs can't be threaded fine grained enough for OGR searches.

I've been donating my computer power to distributed.net Optimal Golomb Ruler search for a while now. I like it, because it's one of the last distributed computing projects that needs a CPU. Apparently GPUs can't be threaded fine grained enough for OGR searches.

A) old thread...

B) Oh pish. There are lots of CPU only projects, and lots more CPU/GPU hybrid projects that let you just not turn on the GPU portion if you don't want to.